Fluttering Tulle
by fulfilled
Summary: Rory knew things would change when she left home, but she wasn’t expecting it to happen like this. Post 4.04, 'Chicken or Beef.'


**Author's Note: **Written as a companion to _Chicken or Beef_ for the GG Watching community's season 4 project. I have to thank **Lady M** immensely—not only did she beta this and give me the title when I couldn't think of anything good, but she also put me in the potting shed mindset and got me thinking about Rory's childhood. Also, she convinced me to sign up for an episode in the project, so really, without her, this story not only wouldn't have taken the route it did, it also probably wouldn't have been written at all.

**Summary:** "I was supposed to have years left before I dealt with this, right?" Rory knew things would change, but she wasn't expecting it to happen like this. Post-4.04, "Chicken or Beef."

**Fluttering Tulle**

One lone piece of tulle fluttered from a tree branch that night, a ghostly illusion teasing the edges of my vision as I walked through the town, hands shoved in my pockets, just walking. Thinking. Remembering. Wondering. My mind jumped from one train of thought to another, bouncing from the conversation I'd had with Dean the day before to that stupid Mark Twain magnet to the first time I'd seen them walking hand-in-hand down the street to the stacks of tablecloths that had almost beaned me in the head.

I was supposed to have years left before I dealt with this, right? Come to think of it, I'd never really thought about dealing with it at all. Even when Dean told me that he and Lindsay were engaged, it was something that was still out there somewhere, so far away that I couldn't even begin to understand what it meant. It was a twisted fairy tale, a story that would happen sometime in the future, sometime beyond the immediacy of finals and graduation and Jess and going to Europe and getting ready for Yale and Fran's funeral and everything else that was capturing my attention that week. Selfish? Maybe. But would anyone else really react any differently?

I was never planning to stand on the edge, almost falling out of the frame, hiding behind a tree, watching my first love marry someone else. I didn't want him for myself; I'd just never thought that he would find someone else so quickly—that he would be married within months of breaking up with me. Never mind that I'd found someone else. That wasn't even remotely close to the point—this was much more permanent than that had been.

Was I that easy to get over?

I watched them run out of the church in a shower of confetti and flower petals, her veil flying behind her as though she was going to take off and float at any second. For an instant, a breeze caught it, and it flew around her, swirling around her face and brushing across Dean's, and their faces were obscured, and for that moment, I could almost pretend that it wasn't them; that it was just another gorgeous wedding.

For a split second, I was seven years old again, a little girl sitting against a tree, an open book in my lap, wisps of hair flying out of my ponytail, and my tongue running unconsciously through the spaces where I was missing teeth. That—leaning against that tree—was my spot, inconspicuous and yet still able to see everything, standing in the middle of a grove of trees at the Independence Inn, watching a wedding taking place in the yard and watching wistfully as some fairy tale came true before my eyes. Of course, by then I had read enough to know that pretty weddings didn't guarantee fairy tale endings, but from where I stood, they sure looked like it.

From where I stood watching Dean and Lindsay's wedding, too, it kind of looked like a fairy tale, for that one moment when their faces were veiled and the tulle blew across them.

Then Dean laughed and swept it away with his hand, holding the veil down with his arms as he held her around the waist and they almost danced down the steps into the square, and suddenly, it didn't look as much like a fairy tale anymore. It's hard to superimpose the face of an ex onto a picture of Prince Charming, when once upon a time they were one and the same, without wanting to use the picture for target practice.

It was like driving past an accident, something that I couldn't tear myself away from. I didn't want to be there; and then, when I was really honest with myself, I did; and then I kicked myself for wanting, deep down, to see it; and then I wondered if I had more masochistic tendencies than I'd previously realized. It was as though I'd always watched the weddings at the Inn—even as recently as Sookie's wedding, when I knew that weddings didn't always equal lifelong happiness and kisses didn't take away the hurt—through a dreamy film, through the tulle blowing across the yard, through a veil of flower petals and confetti and shiny rainbow bubbles.

Leaning against the tree that afternoon, watching Dean and Lindsay glow, surrounded by their family and friends, I felt like I was betraying my seven-year-old self as my tongue instinctively ran across my teeth, looking for a gap to stick through or a loose tooth to play with, my hands fidgety as I realized that I didn't even have a book with me. That wasn't how I watched weddings, and yet… there I was, standing in the shadows, watching from a distance as Dean pledged his love, future, fidelity, life to a girl who once was kind to me.

As a child, when there were weddings at the Inn, I'd see Mom get a wistful look on her face when she thought I wasn't looking, when she gazed across the lush lawn to the dance floor under the stars, but she'd always caught my eye and grinned, the sparkle in her eye replacing the sadness. I'd forget that I'd ever seen the far-away glaze cloud her vision when she took me home, into the potting shed, and tucked me into bed, reading me a fairy tale, even though I was by far old enough to do it myself. Thinking back on it, I realized that those were the days—the wedding days—more than any other when she would still read out loud to me, the stories of Cinderella and Prince Charming underscored by a string quartet, a DJ, a cover band, or a friend of the bride and groom with slight musical aptitude.

Somehow, I got it. No, I didn't want to be married, and I wasn't envious of Lindsay… well, maybe a tiny bit, but that was just because of the dress and the gifts and the excitement I'd seen on her face. I got the shadows in Mom's eyes for the first time, really. Suddenly, it clicked, and I got that she read fairy tales to me on wedding nights because they were stories of finding a place to belong; of finding a person—even more than a location—to call home. She built that for us, but it must have been a huge weight on her shoulders.

It flooded me, that sense of my own restlessness and disconnection. My room was only sort of my room; the place where I spent my nights wasn't really home. Of all the people I saw on a day-to-day basis, the only one who was still constant was Paris, and that wasn't that comforting of a prospect. The others drifted in and out, finding places to fit in this new reality. Mom, Grandma and Grandpa, Dad, Lane, Luke, even Kirk… people I'd once known how to fit in my personal little paradigm didn't have a defined place any more. Others didn't even have a place left at all, and I was stuck trying to cut them—him—out of the picture, trying to fill in—ignore—the gaping holes that mocked me mercilessly.

Suddenly, the jealousy surged through me, if only because Dean had found a person to belong with, and I was still just finding room in the closet for both my shoes and Paris'. It didn't seem fair that some people found that so quickly, when I couldn't see where it would happen in my life, and I'd watched my mom fight for it for as long as I'd been alive.

I buried myself in distractions for the rest of Dean and Lindsay's wedding day, staying in the house and making sure my laundry was perfectly done, that all the loads were sorted by color, temperature, fabric materials, drying option. I think I did about ten loads that afternoon, more picky about laundry than I'd ever been before. I studied, read, watched TV, cleaned the bathroom, tidied my bookshelves and closet, and when I got desperate, I even tidied Mom's closet, since mine was too empty with so much of my stuff at Yale.

The white cloud of tulle niggled at the edge of my brain all day, though, the sheer edges of the gauzy fabric fluttering into my vision, and I kept turning suddenly, thinking I saw it in the curtains on my window, a blouse hanging in my closet, the sun dancing through the leaves of a tree. I was hyper-aware, and it was exhausting.

I felt like I understood the shadows that crossed Mom's eyes on those wedding days a little better. She must have wondered what she was doing, sharing her bed with a kicky little girl who couldn't keep the covers on for the first five years of her life and whose growing limbs kept making the space seem smaller and smaller. In the indelicacy and raw reality of a life like that, fairy tales were an escape. I got mine from books; she saw hers acted out in front of her, a storybook that was always just out of reach.

Or maybe that was just me.

That night, I walked. I paced the streets of Stars Hollow, my eyes glued to that single flag of tulle hanging from the branch overhanging the gazebo as it danced in the breeze, a whimsical fairy taunting me as I tried to run away from the day and just forget that it had ever happened. The ghost of my childhood hovered over the town, and I felt like a crucial part of it had been ripped from me.

It wasn't my relationship with Dean, and it wasn't even that he was with someone else. I meant what I'd told Mom—I wanted him to be happy. Deep down, somewhere underneath the shock and the conflicting emotions, I didn't want to see Dean miserable. I'd loved him once, and something about that carried over. Something about the fact that I'd once been inextricably a part of his life meant that I saw him happy and sad, and I wouldn't wish that sadness and loneliness on someone I'd cared about.

It surprised me when I felt tears forming in the corners of my eyes and my vision started to blur. That wasn't in the plan—but then again, was any of this? The tears spilled hot and angry onto my cheeks, and I had to sit down on one of the benches when my knees refused to hold me up and I suddenly felt cold and couldn't stop shaking.

When I looked up, the dark windows above Luke's were mocking me, vacant, hooded eyes with no life left in them, and a fresh surge of anger ran through me. Why did I have to do it alone? It wasn't fair, and I wanted to cry like a baby, throwing a tantrum at the injustice of it all, but I couldn't even do that. I'd sworn that I would make myself stop loving him, and that meant that I wasn't going to cry over the dark windows anymore.

On nights when I couldn't fall asleep, I used to stare out our window at the Inn, watching the soft lights filtering through the curtains blink off and on one by one. I knew those rooms like they were my own, but when the lights were on, when the glow came through to the outside, they weren't, and I curled up with my blanket, my elbows propped up on our windowsill, and imagined the stories that took place inside when they came to life. Other girls' dolls came to life when darkness fell and sleepy eyes had fallen shut; in my world, the Inn was my life-sized dollhouse, coming to life under the velvet dark.

A light blinked in Luke's side of the apartment, briefly illuminating Jess' old window, and for a split second, my heart leapt into my throat. I instinctively reached for my phone to call him down from the apartment, to sit with me and exorcise the white ghost above my head, only to realize with my finger hovering above the last digit that he wouldn't answer.

Nothing was the same. Dean was on his honeymoon somewhere. Jess was… well, in my mind, Jess was always skulking around another small town somewhere else in the country, wearing his black leather jacket like a bright orange warning sign. I was sitting on a bench in the middle of the town square, glaring at a black window, a long strip of fabric taunting me. And then the anger was replaced by… nothing. It was gone, and surprisingly, nothing rushed in to take its place. I was numb, and it wasn't just because of the chill from the midnight air settling into my body.

It was time to go home.

The kitchen was dark, but my desk lamp was on and my stacks of laundry were piled on my dresser, a note on top reading, "I went to bed. If you're hungry, there's leftover pizza in the refrigerator. Love, Mom."

I wasn't hungry, but that didn't surprise me. Instead, despite the relatively warm early autumn night, I pulled on a pair of warm pajamas and crawled into my bed, curling up my body tightly, the way I'd learned to sleep when I'd started taking up more of Mom's and my bed.

I stared blankly out the window until my eyes drifted shut, falling into a restless sleep plagued with brides in black leather and grooms in white tulle and windows that glowed from within and houses that hummed with the vibrancy of life, and at some point in the middle of the night, I was jerked awake. I found myself spread out again, my legs extended and one arm flung over the pillow, draped over the side of the bed. A shiver ran through me as I curled up tightly, trying to recapture that cocoon that had defined the way I'd slept as a child, but it felt too confining, too tight. Without my mother's body curled around mine, without her length forming a bracket for the tiny ball that my body made, it wasn't right.

The seven-year-old inside me gave way to the eleven-year-old, tentatively stretching out a toe and examining this new space that I suddenly had to sleep in, and eventually that gave way to the fourteen-year-old, luxuriously spreading out over the entire single bed that I could call mine and only mine, and I became myself again.

Nearly nineteen, with the pieces of a broken heart and a fairy tale lost floating around inside me, I fell asleep as a single ghost made of white tulle danced in the moonlight above the gazebo, but I couldn't see it anymore.


End file.
